10 Times WWE Narrowly Avoided Disaster
5. The Last Time WWE Was In Any Genuine Trouble
WWE is fine now in the medium and long term. The TV industry isn't getting any less desperate, the company continue to post record profits, and they continue to make money hand over fist by fisting uprooted families right in the f*cking ear.
You'd have to go back to 2014, possibly, to find a time when there was any sort of consequence to anything WWE did. That year, the company chatted sh*t and got banged; a bullish McMahon ultimately misled investors by over-pushing size of the expected rights fee. The deal signed with USA did not see the fees tripled, as suggested, which briefly nuked the stock price.
The company wasn't yet future-proofed. Consumer-driven metrics still mattered to a degree, and WWE almost pissed the consumer off to high heaven by planning a Randy Orton Vs. Batista main event at WrestleMania XXX. The prospect was considered so unfathomably uninspiring and removed from the pulse that social media platforms soon broke out in conversations of protests, hijacks, even a mass walkout.
What if they didn't cave to the pressure? What if fans actually walked out of the Superdome, which, together with the death of the Streak, might have converged to shatter all hope within the fandom? What does the already underwhelming rights fee look like then?
Even then, a corporate revamp had already set this new paradigm in motion...